Cheap Raspberry Pi's A+ and B+ (UK)

Hi All,

I've just bought a couple of Raspberry Pi's from PC World, they are currently on offer ;

RASPBERRY PI B+ Board - £19.49 (clearance price)
https://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/comp.../raspberry-pi-b-board-10106325-pdt.html#cat-0

RASPBERRY PI A+ Board - £12.98 (Easter deal)
https://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/comp...spberry-pi-a-board-10109311-pdt.html#longDesc

Just thought I'd let people know if they were thinking of buying one in the near future, I don't normally buy from here but the price says it all.

Regards,
Leftfield95

Presumably because the new 1Gb one is out

Still worth having though.

I agree, they're getting rid of old stock. But they were good enough for everyone last winter, so no reason not to get them now.

I don't need the extra power of the latest version yet, so the cheap price justifies getting them for projects such as a usb digital microscope screen, time lapse photography etc.

I have an RPi 2 and the older board. The difference in performance is amazing with the extra memory and 4 cores. Using Netbeans to remotely create native software running on the PI board from a PC Linux host is no longer a chore. I plan to host the software on the old board but all development is now on the RPi 2.
https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/cnd/remotedev-tutorial.html

Did they ever solve the SD memory corruption problem? I gave up on mine because of that, and it's now sitting on the shelf. If it hadn't been for need to restore the SD card from backup after every 5th boot-up, I would have found a million uses for it.

I haven't had a problem with SD memory with the latest kernels but most people are accustomed to just pulling the plug on devices instead of shutting them down properly but that's a bad idea with a Linux file system that buffers blocks. Most of my work is done on NFS mounted file systems or USB drives to keep usage of the SD card as low as possible.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=82168

Yes, I'm well aware of the proper shutdown method, as well as warnings not to overclock, as well as using only the specifically listed SD cards that have been proven to work (that in itself is a red flag). I did everything by the book, but I could get no more than about 5 boots before the SD was trashed. IMO it was a design fail. Yes, the majority of users had no problems, but there was still a sufficient number of users like me that could never get reliable operation, that I have to conclude that it was a borderline design. It's unfortunate, because the rPi was a great idea, but I won't buy any more of them until I see some well documented evidence that the problem has been resolved.

Eventually, I'll try moving as much as possible of the OS over to a USB stick, but I've kind of lost the momentum at this point.

I think the underlying problem was that cheap friction SD card socket they used on the original boards. The RPi 2 has a micro-SD socket (push click in/out) that's much better.